brainstorming

To turn ideas into an approved design spec, use a pre-implementation design workflow that enforces stepwise questioning, architecture decisions, and section-by-section user approval before any code is written.

Evaluating architecture trade-offs during project decomposition involves proposing 2–3 approaches, comparing their constraints, and requiring explicit user approval on each design section before proceeding to spec authoring.

Writing and validating a design spec requires authoring a design document, committing it, performing a self-review for placeholders or ambiguities, and asking the user to review the spec before generating an implementation plan.

You cannot start implementation before design approval because the workflow enforces a hard implementation guardrail, only transitioning to writing-plans after the user explicitly approves the documented design spec.

Clarifying project requirements involves exploring the current project state and asking one question at a time to converge on purpose, constraints, and success criteria before determining what to build.

A question-driven design workflow prevents wasted implementation by forcing explicit design clarification, decomposition, and trade-off evaluation upfront, ensuring architecture decisions are approved before coding begins.